Intel has just released their Xeon E7 v2 processors for high performance computing (HPC) needs. These processors scale up to models that have 15 cores and 30 threads! The models in this series are part of the “Ivytown” series.

The flagship chip of the series will be the Xeon E7-8890 v2. This chip will boast 15 cores, bringing it one step closer to AMD Opteron 6300 Series which has 16 cores on its top model. The chip will have 4.31 billion transistors and a die size of 541mm2 with a modular architecture that splits the cores into blocks of three, each block has 5 cores with their own L3 cache, embedded ring bus and I/O. The chip will have 37.5 MB of L3 cache and a TDP of 155W.

This architecture can support 8 sockets so 8 of these chips running together could amount to 120 cores, 240 threads and 300 MB cache shared via QPI v1.1.